Hezah, 26

My fellow twenty-something comrades and I have great discussions about life. We talk about everything from money glitches, good TV, bad TV, family drama, work frustrations, successes, failures, things we want to buy, things we should not have purchased, and of course relationships and THE Feelings. As I inch closer and closer to the era that will later be known as my “late twenties,” I can’t help but look back at the last six year emotional roller coaster and be in awe of these experiences and how they have shaped me and my present day attitude.

In speaking with my contemporaries, listening to their worries and wins, I have come to realize something very important about feelings as we age. It’s a paradox, really. Getting older makes it harder to open up and talk about how you feel, yet it becomes harder and harder not to. Years of scar tissue fill the open spaces, creating a fortress for your feelings with growing restrictions on entry and release.  But, as these same years roll on by, it becomes increasingly more difficult to not to allow visitation rights. I don’t understand how Alanis left out this glaring example of irony in her musical tirade.

Let’s face it kids, aside from the stereotypical biological clock, we are running out of time. Existentially speaking, we have been on a ticking timer since we left the womb. We spend the beginning of our early adulthood floating along the lazy river of our twenties on these little life rafts called college degrees, having been pushed offshore by hesitant parentals, desperately trying to swim back up stream. But, at some point you hit exhaustion, let go, and allow the current push you closer to your thirties. When that happens, you lose patience, stop wanting to play games, and start to gain true clarity on what you actually want from your career, family, a significant other, and life in general.

 As the bank of experiences grow fatter, our emotional muscle memory becomes sharper, making it easier to recognize that, “I’ve been here before,” feeling. You get to a point where you’ve tried on enough people, characters, and personalities to know just what you’re dealing in less than five minutes. Even though maturity tends to make our senses more acute, that doesn’t mean we make good decisions, stop putting ourselves in emotionally precarious situations, or rationalize away red flags. No, there is still a little childlike hopefulness in all of us tugging at the bottom of our shirt saying, “maybe this time will be different.” We all want to put ourselves wholly “out there,” but it gets harder and harder to muster the courage, even with the glimmer of potential happiness is reasonably in sight.

It’s these contradictory feelings that cause us to put up walls, hibernate when things get hard, get drunk and text people you really shouldn’t, lose your appetite, eat your feelings, buy a lot of shoes, start exercising, lose motivation, accept the idea of dying alone, and listen to Elliot Smith. However, it’s also what propels you to get back out there, give it a go, dive in head first, leap without looking, tell your brain to shut up and give your heart the green light, take a fugging chance, and let someone else in.

Isn’t it ironic?

Alf, 40

For the first twenty-two years of my life, it was so easy.  I didn’t have to work on it.  At all.  It just sort of happened.  And I just kind of assumed that was the way it was.

I was never the most social of kids.  My birthday parties were fun but not exactly the social highlight of the year.  (I had lemon cake instead of chocolate - that probably didn’t help.)  I had several friends, but few enough that they’re not running together in my brain even three decades down the road.  People seemed to like me well enough.  Each year, in each grade, I met new people, made some new friends…and drifted apart from some old ones.  It happens.  It’s not deliberate. We grow up, priorities change, and we simply don’t take steps to maintain those relationships.

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Brandy, 25

In your twenties your friends start to do things.  Things like getting married, moving in with serious boyfriends or girlfriends, having children.  You know… those scary things that go along with having a mature loving relationship with another human being. 

These things are foreign to me.  Very foreign.  For whatever reason (and definitely through no fault of my own… right? RIGHT?) I have never been in a serious relationship.  When I go on a second date with someone, it basically makes headline news.  I’ve done my best to accept my plight in the search for love, but one of the worst parts about getting older is that it is becoming less and less easy for me to scoff cynically as I watch my friends do these big-life-changing-relationship-things.  They’re not just getting married anymore because “oh you know, they’re super religious” and no, we can’t continue to sigh cautiously as we say “yeah I know…they are really young to be taking that step.”  Because we aren’t really that young anymore.  Our mid-twenties are indeed the appropriate time to be doing things like committing ourselves to one another.  Ugh.

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